Salon.com > Clare Malone

Is Ohio headed for a legal showdown?

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 23:27:00 +0000

If you’re confused by the reports coming out of key battleground state Ohio about last-minute changes to voting rules there, you’re not alone. The state’s current voting regulations have more moving parts than a live Lady Gaga show. On Election Day, speculation abounds about legal battles that could lie ahead come Wednesday morning.

I called up Ned Foley, professor at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and director of Election Law @ Moritz, a bipartisan center on electoral procedure, to guide me through the wilderness.

Foley, it should be noted, thinks that the possibility we won’t know the winner of the presidential race by late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning is “quite unlikely,” despite the fact that the chattering classes have been talking about Ohio as this year’s potential Florida.

That being said, semper paratus (always ready).

Ohio’s Democratic revolution?

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:00:00 +0000

United States Senator Sherrod Brown is wearing Velcro strap sneakers. They are distinctly geriatric in flavor, black and sturdy-looking, the sort that might be found in the “Mall Walking” section of the shoe wall at FootLocker. Brown is wearing them with a suit. On stage. At a big Teamsters rally a couple of weeks before Election Day.

Say what you will about Brown—and plenty has been said about the liberalbête noire of national conservatives during this election cycle—but the man certainly has his own distinct brand of business casual. And in his fierce race to maintain his Senate seat against Republican State Treasurer Josh Mandel, it just might be Brown’s brand of who-gives-a-hoot sartorial schlump and off-the-cuff crankiness that is winning Ohio voters over.

Can Obama hold on in Ohio?

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:59:00 +0000

Soren Norris is pretty sure he’s just been spouse-blocked.

Norris, a canvasser for Working America, the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate, is walking away from a door that’s been slammed in his face by a rotund man in a polo shirt and khakis at the mention of Ohio’s incumbent Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown. He explains the phenomenon, common enough in this politically divided state to have been given a name by political professionals. “It’s when you want to talk to one, and the other one won’t let you talk to them. She might have been in the back. Who knows?” Norris shrugs off the encounter and is soon off to the next house on his list. He and his team of canvassers need to knock on 3,500 doors in Cuyahoga Falls, a city 45 minutes south of Cleveland, tonight—T-minus 25 days until Election Day in Ohio.

It’s just a movie!

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:43:00 +0000

On Saturday, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, Pakistan’s railways minister, held a press conference and declared that he would pay $100,000 of his own money to anyone who could capture the maker of a now-infamous YouTube movie trailer that depicts the Prophet Muhammad killing innocent men and juggling underage girls in his desert tent. The clip has careened around the Internet, inspiring violent protests and attacks in some Muslim-majority countries and cities. But it has also inspired bewilderment in the West—how could a trailer so farcically bad be construed by millions of Muslims as representative of the feelings of the majority of Americans toward Islam? Don’t they understand that the video doesn’t speak for the U.S. government? Can’t they lighten up? Don’t they understand freedom of speech?

The short answer is, no, not in the same way that we in the West do.

Nuns in revolt

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:25:00 +0000

The Sisters of Saint Joseph are waiting for a bus, glistening ever so slightly as they stand in the near-100-degree heat of a late June afternoon, huddled under a couple of pine trees that border an asphalt parking lot in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. The blocky, charmless building the lot services is home to the district office of Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick, a Tea Party Republican, and the bus the sisters are waiting for isn’t any old municipal four-wheeler. The Nuns on the Bus are coming to town.

Earlier in the month, a rotating cast of nuns led by Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of a social-justice lobbying group called Network, set out on a two-week, nine-state tour of the country to protest the radical cuts to social services included in Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget, approved by the GOP-led House and supported by his soon-to-be running mate, Mitt Romney. The tour is something of a calculated guilt trip—every stop is coordinated to confront Catholic lawmakers or Republican leaders who voted for the legislation. “Reasonable revenue for responsible programs” has become the slogan of the Nuns on the Bus, one that Campbell and the sisters chant to the crowds that greet them at every stop.